


This Even Keel

by ladyflowdi



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, Implied Child Abuse, M/M, Pre-Slash, Royalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-20
Updated: 2010-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:32:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyflowdi/pseuds/ladyflowdi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Arthur is five years old, he develops a debilitating fear of the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Even Keel

**Author's Note:**

> Another of my LJ-to-AO3 fics, I wrote this in early 2010 in response to a prompt from a friend on why Arthur wasn't very concerned about being locked up in the dungeons in episode 1x04. It spiraled out of control after that, because I am incapable of being succinct.

When Arthur is five years old, he develops a debilitating fear of the dark. Not just dark spaces, or the nooks and crannies of the castle where light of day had only once shown, but of every sort of darkness, the very Earth’s darkness as the sun sinks and the moon rises up like an all-seeing eye. 

It is a crushing fear, one that begins to overtake him even when his father is at home, even when the sun is high in the sky. He goes cold and damp with sweat before the sun has gone down, and when he does sleep, _if_ he sleeps, his dreams are filled with nightmare visions of all the evil in the world, goblins and ghouls and beasts waiting to curl their fingers around his father and eat him up.

His father says, “I will always come back to you,” but his father can’t know that for certain, because Owain’s father never came back to him. 

His father says, “You mustn’t let this fear consume you,” and Arthur _tries_ , he tries so hard, stays up as long as he can one night looking out of the nursery window at the moon and the stars and the dark streets of the lower town, and can hardly breathe through the terror that makes his heart beat like a mouse’s. 

His father says, angry, “This is behavior unbecoming a prince,” when Arthur begs him not to go, howling through his tears. 

When Arthur is five years old, his father locks him outside in the walled garden behind his antechamber. It is dusk and Arthur thinks the plank-lock fell by accident, that someone will realize he’s gone missing before the night creep-crawls over Camelot. He sits by the door, and plays with his favorite ball, and waits for his nurse to come fetch him. His father will be angry, he thinks, for having worried him.

No one comes. The sun sets, and the dark slinks across the garden, and suddenly Arthur can’t seem to stop shaking, can’t seem to catch his breath, because night is coming, shadows creeping over the walkways and flowers and grass, and he’s locked out. He knocks on the door again, calls for his nurse, for the guard, for his father, because it’s almost time for the evening meal and surely someone knows he’s missing by now.

No one comes. His father’s windows are dark, when by now they would be alight with candle flame for their meal together. They’re dark and the moon is starting to rise and no one is coming, Arthur is certain of it, knows it deep inside his belly where his fear is squirming like a basket of snakes. 

There is no escape, no place to hide, and Arthur goes wet between his legs because the night is everywhere, all around him, on his arms, his legs, his face. The stars are coming out and the darkness is crushing him into the ground and it’s all he can do to pound on the door, to scream and scream until he tastes metal in the corners of his mouth, begging his father to let him in, _please let him in_ because in the darkness is where the evils of the world lurk, waiting to snatch him up and devour him whole.

Something in Arthur breaks that night. He is too little to understand just what, but it is something significant, from the very moment his father opens the door and steps out into the garden, with his big boots and the golden circlet atop his head that catches the morning light. He calls Arthur’s name but Arthur can’t move, frozen like water in winter. He doesn’t move when his father calls his name a second time, nor when his father kneels down and looks underneath the rose bush at him. 

“Arthur,” his father says.

His father’s face is in shadow, morning light cascading around his head like a halo. Arthur looks into the darkness and does not answer.

 

.

When Arthur is seven, his imagination gets the best of him. He’s small for his age and hopelessly used to getting his own way. He has nurses who dote after him, and squires who take him on pig-back rides through the castle proper, and Gaius, who lets him pour and stir and wear his spectacles. The townspeople call him ‘little prince’, and every time he goes into the lower town with his father they give him presents, little bits and bobs without much value to anyone other than a seven year old boy. Arthur cherishes them as if they were the treasures of Solomon. He hides them all away in the chest of drawers his father had built for him, so tall he needs a stool to work the heavy key into the lock, and takes them out every so often to carefully run his fingers over them.

Being small and adorable has given him somewhat of an advantage, he’s discovered. His tutor, Sir Richard, who resembles an old billy goat more than a once virile, courageous knight, often lets Arthur’s studies slide to the wayside to regale him with stories of his father, the then Prince Uther, under the command of King Aurelius, Arthur’s uncle. They are tales of mystery and romance (though Arthur likes the bits about fighting the best) of the dashing king and the prince regent, united brothers standing before their foes. He and Owain love to play those stories in the orchards, the trees the oncoming hoard of barbarians and they the royals standing in defense of their people. They play with practice swords of light wood that splinter all too easily, especially when he and Owain battle the apple trees for the right to the fair Igraine’s hand. 

“No, no, no,” Owain says, crossing his arms over his frumpy summer tunic two inches too short in the sleeves. It’s his brother Cynan’s, six years his elder and already a year on in his knight training. He looks ridiculous, but Owain is Arthur’s best friend and best friends don’t point those things out.

Arthur sighs, making the grass flutter a bit around his mouth. He can hear insects creep-crawling through the grass, buzzing in the hot summer air, and he wriggles his toes into the warm earth. His pup huffs happily on Arthur’s belly, pink tongue flopping out to lick at Arthur’s chin. “Don’t be such a ninny.”

“I’m not a ninny,” Owain answers with a glare. “I just don’t want to.”

“Chicken!”

“Oy!” Owain yells, and lobs an apple core at him. 

“Bawk bawk bawk!” Arthur crows, and flaps his arms, and makes the pup bark and run in circles with glee. Owain isn’t a ninny, not really, not when it counts, and though he yells and makes a to-do about things, Arthur convinces him as he knew he would. 

He and Owain had found all the secret passages in the castle long ago, and it is only a matter of waiting until Sir Milton, the very old, very mean taskmaster, is bellowing at the knights outside to sneak through the passage that connects the forum hall to the armory. Why the rooms are connected Arthur doesn’t quite understand – he is rather of the mind that one of his old, dusty relatives had built it so he could have a whole army waiting in the other room should the signing of a peace treaty go sour. Regardless, no one pays much mind to two slightly dirty, vaguely smudged seven year old boys running underfoot, even if one is a prince.

How long they play in the armory he doesn’t know, only that every noise makes them jump and giggle nervously. The hint of danger only adds to the appeal. The steel swords are too heavy for them to lift, but the training swords, thick, furrowed wood and greased, taut hilts wrapped in linen, are perfect. They touch the daggers and armor with awe, pluck at the bow strings to make music, try on the helmets and wrist guards. 

Really, Arthur went into the adventure thinking he’d probably get caught, but being the prince lent itself to certain privileges. After all, it is _his_ armory after a fashion. Still, he isn’t expecting Sir Milton’s bellow from the doorway, or the sharp cry from the knights behind him. Arthur blinks at them around the axe he’s swinging over his head.

When he and Owain are brought before his father, hands dirty and faces smudged, Arthur is prepared for the volume his father yells at, and the shame his father makes him feel, and the anger his father expresses. What he isn’t prepared for is to be taken over his father’s knee in front of the knights, and Sir Milton, and _Owain_ , and given the beating of his life. It goes on forever, until the force of his father’s hand on his backside hurts so much Arthur can hardly stand it, until he can feel his father’s anger and disappointment as if he had placed it directly into Arthur’s heart.

He cries until he can’t breathe, great heaving tears full of humiliation and pain, and only then, when he’s sobbing wet into his father’s knee does his father straighten him up, tug his trousers back onto his hips, and say, “You will go back to your room and stay there until I call for you.”

He goes.

Two weeks pass before Arthur is brought back before his father, to sit at his side for their supper. It is the first time in his life that Arthur can’t talk to his father, as if all of his words dried up in his belly on the trip from the nursery to his father’s antechamber. Even the meal they’re sharing – venison sausage and cormarye, Arthur’s favorite – tastes bitter in the corners of his mouth and gamey on his tongue. 

His father says, “Sir Richard will no longer be your tutor,” as if that settles matters.

“Yes, sire,” Arthur says in return, and watches his father go still.

 

.

Arthur’s father leaves for a campaign in the spring of Arthur’s eleventh year, and when he returns he’s got a girl with him.

Two long months have passed since his father left to defend their western border. It is only chance that he is looking out his tower window when the party comes over the hill, gleaming in Pendragon red, and he takes off running to meet them, taking the steps four at a time with his tutor shrieking after him. 

He runs, barefoot and wild and not at all becoming of a prince, but Arthur doesn’t _care_ because his father is alive, his father has come back. He meets the party just as they approach through the forest path and his father, _his father_ jumps down from his horse and catches him up in a hug that makes Arthur’s bones creak. Arthur, for his part, buries his face in his father’s cloak so the knights won’t see, smells dirt and blood and horse liniment, smells his _father_ underneath it, whole and well. 

“Arthur,” his father says into his cheek, gloved fingers in his hair, “I’ve brought someone with me.”

That’s when Arthur notices the girl in the deep blue traveling cloak, with her upturned nose and pale, pale skin. Her nurse, a plain, horsey woman with enormous, cats-green eyes glares at him as if he’s mud on her boot. 

“This is Morgana,” his father says, and smiles at the girl in a way he has never smiled at Arthur.

The girl, as it turns out, is three winters older than Arthur and every inch the spoilt princess. She smells of perfumes and soaps, wears silk dresses so well made they seem to flow like water down her slim, regal frame, and her hair is always curled and braided with ribbons and bits and bobs of pretty girl things. She walks as if she’s on air, head thrown back and hands clasped sedately in front of her. 

She isn’t a princess, and Arthur is a prince set to inherit an empire, but next to her he feels like the country cousin, shift constantly falling down his shoulder and dirt almost always smeared on some part of his person. His father, too, seems enamored with her in a way that makes Arthur’s heart beat too fast. He has special meetings with the girl, or simply sits next to her and reads sedately, or takes her on long walks through the gardens. 

“Don’t you see, mate?” Owain asks one afternoon, eyebrows furrowed. “She’s set to be queen, isn’t she?”

Arthur blinks at him, because – “No.”

“Dunno about that,” Owain says, and pokes his frog so it’ll catch up to Arthur’s. “That’s what my mum says, anyway. Why else would your father have brought her here?”

The thought won’t leave his head once Owain has planted it there. The way his father speaks to the girl, or holds her hand gently in the crook of his arm when they arrive at dinner parties in the great hall, or the way the girl carries herself as if she is already royalty, though she is only the daughter of a dead duke and her fief hardly compares with Arthur’s birthright. 

He’s too proud to admit that the ugly feeling in his heart whenever he sees the girl is anything like jealousy, even though it burns in him like fire. The feeling only grows the longer the girl is in residence at Camelot, and he finds himself doing things to her that he never would consider doing to any other lady at court. He steps on her train when she is walking ahead of him, just so he can see her stumble, and knocks into her with his shoulders and elbows when passing by. He kicks her legs under the table when they’re seated across from one another, and does his utmost best to spill something on her at least once a week. He’s ruined at least four of her dresses since she came to Camelot, Arthur knows, because her handmaiden, a slight young thing Arthur vaguely remembers as being the swordsmith’s daughter, is wearing them stained with wine and red sauce.

His father, of course, is none too amused by his antics if Arthur has read the disapproving slant of his mouth correctly, but it serves him right, too, for bringing this… this _girl_ to Camelot to be Arthur’s mother, when he doesn’t need a mother at all, thank you. He’s done perfectly fine all this time without having this _female_ lurking about with her perfectly coifed hair and perfectly made clothes and perfect poise and dignity.

The feeling grows, uglier and darker and sharper in his heart, as summer turns to fall and the girl makes no move of leaving. Nobles often bedded down in Camelot over the winter, but never have they been so immediate in Arthur’s familial circle. Deepest winter is the only time Arthur truly has with his father all year, when he can be as selfish as he likes with his father’s time and affection. His father taught him to shoot a bow in the winter, the whistle of the arrow singing in the bitingly cold air, and how to play chess, the fragile, ancient board that had been in their family for six generations brittle under their fingers. They went riding, the horses billowing steam from their nostrils, and when he was little and the ice curled up the windows, his father would tuck him into his big bed and tell him stories of Arthur’s grandfather, the kindest, fairest man to ever have lived.

What gets him into trouble is when the jealousy he will never admit to gets the best of him.

Before he puts his plan into action he knows he’s going to get caught, that his father isn’t going to stand for it, that it’s very possible his father will do what he did so many years ago and turn Arthur over his knee before the entire court. All of that is in his head, ringing like the warning bell high in its turret, and yet he can’t seem to stop himself. This girl has invaded his kingdom and Arthur feels like he’s seven years old again, playing Uther and Aurelius in the orchard with Owain, battling an unforeseen enemy. She is danger, silent and lurking and waiting, though for what reason he doesn’t know, doesn’t _care_ to know. 

The girl has a routine set in stone. At first Arthur had thought it was her nurse who kept her to such a rigid schedule, more rigid than Arthur’s even, but her nurse takes sick the second month after the cold has set in and the girl follows her schedule to the letter, making it ever so much easier for him. 

Oh yes. Ridiculously simple to crouch in the frost-covered bushes and wait until the girl approached on her normal afternoon ride, side-saddle like a good girl, hair coifed and warm in her fur wrap and looking so entitled that Arthur’s blood burned in his veins.

The thing about frogs, strangely enough, was that when one kept matched pairs in one’s boudoir they had the tendency to multiply like mad. Though he’s perfectly aware Owain will never forgive him for it, he decides their sacrifice will be for the greater good. 

He isn’t prepared for the way the horse rears up, screaming and stamping at the dozen’s of leaping frogs when Arthur sets them free, or for the way the girl’s eyes suddenly meet his, terror-struck and with a horrible knowledge. Isn’t prepared for the way she falls from the animal, or the sickening crack of broken bone, or the way her handmaiden screams, young voice so full of fear that it chills Arthur to his marrow. 

The horse runs off at full-tilt, and he’s left staring like a perfect idiot at the silk-white of the girl’s face where she is sprawled in the grass, and the handmaiden’s eyes, striking him with pity and anger and deference, even as she holds a handkerchief to the blood running free from the girl’s arm, twisted and turned horribly.

“Sire, we need help,” the handmaiden says, her voice a’tremble, and Arthur turns and runs, runs and runs all the way back to the castle, to his father, because it’s all he knows what to do.

It isn’t until later, when the girl has been rescued by his father’s knights and seen to by Gaius, that his father calls for him. The feeling of unease is familiar now. Arthur had known that his father would be angry with him, but nothing prepares him for his father to say, eyes wild with fury before the entire Court, “The punishment for injury against the crown and those under its protection is fifty lashes.”

For a moment Arthur doesn’t understand what he’s hearing, even though the words have taken with them Arthur’s ability to breathe. “Father, I – I didn’t mean—”

“It hardly matters what you meant or not, because your actions have belittled not only yourself, but everything we stand for. You have caused immeasurable pain to an innocent, to someone in need of your protection, not your scorn.”

The words take the breath from Arthur’s body, and his knees go like water. He doesn’t know how he remains standing, and the eyes on him, all those eyes, burn through him like fire. Those eyes are judging him, and find him lacking. 

“As you are the prince and heir apparent to this kingdom, your position allows you a mitigated sentence,” his father says, but the blood is roaring in Arthur’s skull and he doesn’t hear the rest of it. It isn’t his father sitting before him, the man who had taken him swimming behind the orchard the summer of his sixth year, when the heat had been unbearable and the only respite was a dip in the cool lake water. It isn’t the man who pressed his dry, callused fingers to Arthur’s cheek when he was feverish and coughing last winter, or even the man who had hugged him so tightly when he’d returned from the south with the girl and her nurse. This man sitting before him, merciless anger lining every inch of his face, is Arthur’s king, and he is suddenly so terrified of him it is all he can do not to turn and run. 

Arthur doesn’t remember being taken to the dungeon, as if his mind had shrunk in on itself, hiding away from the reality of the situation he put himself in. He doesn’t remember having his shift removed, or being tied to the post he has seen rapists and thieves beaten against. It is only when the first stripe is laid on his back, and the haze of fear turns into pain as sharp as a blade dragging across his skin, that Arthur realizes what’s happening, that he isn’t dreaming, that it isn’t a nightmare. He knows it is Sir Milton punishing him, that for all his father’s anger and bitter disappointment his lashes will be given to him with a mild hand, but as the second one is laid across the first he can barely find it in himself to breathe, let alone imagine how much worse this could be. 

All Arthur remembers is the pain, and the bite of the leather around his wrists as he twisted and fought to be free. He remembers the way he screamed, too young and without a man’s pride to keep himself silent, though that would come in the years when he found himself in this very same position, time and again. He remembers the stink of his own fear, the sweat that burned into the lines of fire across his skin, and the anger that seemed to build and build until it was rage, a red-hot haze over his eyes. But so much worse than the anger was the confusion, his singular inability to believe that it was at his father’s word that he hurt as he did, at his father’s hand that he burned as he did.

Years later, a wise wizard would tell him that there are moments in a man’s life that put him on the road he will follow until the end of his days, and that without those moments one can never fully grasp one’s destiny. Arthur would be a man before he realized that the lesson his father had tried to teach that night was not the one Arthur learned. 

The girl comes to see him a fortnight later, when the wounds have become thin scars, red and raw to the touch. He can’t stand the touch of cloth against them, and he feels a sliver of respect for her when she doesn’t flinch at the sight of his bare skin. For the first time in their acquaintance, she doesn’t behave like a proper little princess.

She comes into his room with a rustle of cloth, and Arthur has a hard time looking at her until she stops beside his bed and asks, “Why do you hate me?”

At that, Arthur meets her eyes squarely. “Because I only had my father until you came, and now I have no one.”

“You’re wrong,” Morgana says, and sits at the edge of his bed, and Arthur can see the lines of pain around her eyes and the horror of what he’s done swells up in him again. Her arm is wrapped tightly and bound to her body, the cloth of her bandage so ugly against the silk of her blue dress. He can’t help looking down, away, even when she catches his hand, strokes her thumb over the fading marks on his wrist. “Arthur. You’re wrong.”

But he isn’t, is the thing, because his father doesn’t speak to him again until the first flowers poke through the crust of snow blanketing Camelot, and doesn’t meet his eyes until the first heat of summer.

He begins his knights training a year early, after that. He knows it is the way his father can cement his power by making sure their rival kingdoms see Arthur as a future king to be contended with, if he is so strong he can begin his training earlier than any other prince has in more years than Geoffrey can count. 

But Arthur knows his father is giving him another chance to prove himself, both as a prince and a man worthy of the throne, just as he knows his father wants to be proud of him and it is Arthur himself who is not allowing that to happen. 

He can’t afford another misstep.

 

.

Arthur spends his first night in the dungeons when he is fifteen, and the less said about it the better. The sickening terror of being locked away in the dark, forgotten and alone for three long days is something he will never forget, though he does his best not to remember. It would be a full year before he would be able to sleep without the fire flickering in his hearth, and another one after before he could tell his servants to take the candles with them when they left for the evening.

He was out of favor with his father when he met Anna. Arthur has long grown accustomed to it, the cessation of contact between them at the smallest provocation. Unlike before, however, it has become a welcome respite. When his father is not speaking to him at least he isn’t speaking _about_ him anywhere Arthur can hear. He’s grown tired of being the topic of conversation between his father and his many tutors and the elder knights, as if he’s a slab of meat, as if he isn’t right there listening as his father lists his faults.

She’d been beautiful, a slip of a thing that seemed to glow gold, with the most expressive eyes he’d ever seen and a smile that took his breath away. Even knowing everything that would come to pass, Arthur never regrets knowing Anna. Never regrets playing with her in the fields, the silk of her dark hair in messy braids, the freckles on her cheeks singing her station louder than her mouth ever could. She’d been wild and reckless and so full of joy, and she’d taken him on that journey with her, had given him a taste of freedom so sweet, pleasure so fine that he could have drowned in her. He could have married her, his sweet Anna, with her soft hands and mischievous mouth and her heart, three times too big.

Arthur never sees her again. He would wonder after her for many years, now and then, wonder what their life could have been like if Arthur wasn’t a man set to inherit a kingdom and she wasn’t a woman set to inherit a life of servitude. He doesn’t even know if his father had her killed, or sent to a nunnery, or married, but it is the one thing he dares not ask. Not for his sake but for hers, if she is still alive.

Sometimes, when the pain is unendurable, when he’s had enough at the hands of his trainers and his father, when his muscles scream and his bones are like water, he goes away and daydreams of her in a little cottage by the sea.

 

.

When Arthur is seventeen, he gets kidnapped by Mercian knights.

It’s all rather civilized for a kidnapping, actually, because Bayard isn’t stupid enough to kill his border-enemy’s son when said border-enemy has a large army and better-trained knights. It isn’t comfortable – their dungeons aren’t like those in Camelot, as they seem to have something of a rat infestation – but Arthur isn’t hurt, save a knock on his head and an ugly slashing wound on his sword arm, and he’s fed better than a common criminal. It isn’t comfortable, no, but he _has_ been kidnapped. It could be a lot worse.

Days goes by before Bayard shows up at Arthur’s cell door, stares at him through the bars with an unreadable expression. He motions for the guard to unlock the door and comes in, hand on his sword hilt. “Word has reached me from your father.”

“Oh, has it?” Arthur asks, and in a way he already knows what note the messenger brought Bayard, can see it as if he’d written it himself. He crosses his hands over his belly, one ankle over the other. “And what does he say?”

“That he will not meet my demands.”

It isn’t anything less than Arthur expected, and he shrugs and smiles. “I told you he wouldn’t.”

Bayard sits down on the single chair in the room. Arthur watches the guards tense up in the hall and is inordinately pleased with himself. Bayard looks at him, drills his eyes into Arthur’s. “I told your father I would kill you, if he did not provide me with what I wanted.”

Arthur knows that, but to have it spoken aloud stings at his pride, and something else he will never talk about. “It wasn’t talk, when you brought me here. I told you then that you would gain nothing from this except for an increased Camelotian presence in the coal caves and more bad blood between you. New bad blood between yourself and I.”

“I don’t like being dismissed so easily.”

“You’re not the one being dismissed, sire. This is, as my tutor so often says, a learning experience.”

Bayard leans back in his chair, studies him. “Your father is refusing my demands because he wants to teach you a lesson?”

“My father is refusing your demands because he expects me to get myself out of this mess. He will not meet your demands, sire, and he will not come to my rescue. That’s just the way it is.”

“Perhaps he would change his mind if I hung you in the citadel square and stripped the flesh from your bones.” 

The threat is very real, though Bayard makes no move to stand, and his expression is more questioning than anything else. Arthur meets his gaze. “You could, yes. But I’m a crafty sort of fellow, sire. Sneaky, some have said. My father isn’t coming for me because he knows I will escape, one way or another. He’s the one who taught me, after all.” 

He sits up slowly, ignoring the sound of swords unsheathing in the hall outside his cell. “We find ourselves at a fork in the road, Bayard. One path is bright; I see you letting me go on my way, I see myself telling my father that I was kidnapped by rogue bandits and that King Bayard had nothing to do with it, and he sends gifts in apology as well as his solemn word that those bandits will be brought to justice. On that road I see peace for our two kingdoms, because my father will not be here forever, and I don’t forget kindnesses. The other road it not quite so bright, because regardless of what you do to me I _will_ get back to Camelot. Whether I am whole and well is up to you. If I escape, I will heal and count the days until my father leaves this world for the next, and then I will bring hellfire down upon you. And if for some reason I don’t make it back to Camelot alive, if you _kill_ me, my father will take the lives of every Mercian man, woman and child in repayment, and make you pray ten times over for death by the time he feels he has been avenged.”

Bayard’s nostrils are flared, his face a shade paler than what it had been a moment before, and Arthur thinks maybe he’s driven it into that thick skull that Mercia is here at his father’s whim, that the resources available to Camelot could wipe the very memory of Mercia from the earth. He leans back against the wall, comfortable. “It’s your choice what path we take, sire.” 

Two days later Arthur makes it back to Camelot bearing a mule packed high with gifts and goods. News of his return travels fast, and his father bursts into Gaius’ rooms just as the old man is rewrapping Arthur’s well-tended wound.

Arthur sees a myriad of emotions cross his father’s face before he controls them, and when he strides in, purposefully, Gaius has only a moment to move out of the way before Arthur is being collected into his father’s arms.

 

.

When Arthur is twenty he meets a mousy little fellow named Merlin, with an attitude as large as his ears. He’s country through and through, can’t help but be having been named after a bird, and wearing a truly appalling hairstyle that makes Arthur think his mother tipped a bowl over his head and cut around it. It’s only made worse when Merlin _saves his life_ and his father, being the great comedian he can sometimes be, gifts Merlin to him as if Arthur needs protection from a boy who can barely walk in a straight line.

The thing about Merlin is, having been raised in the country, he has no social skills to speak of and even less experience dealing with his betters. He treats everyone as equals, from the lowest farm hands to the ladies of the Court, and doesn’t see anything wrong with calling Arthur by his name and not his title. His cheek is outrageous and for all Arthur scolds he loves it, can’t help but revel in the way Merlin treats him like any other man, as if Arthur isn’t royalty. He’s impertinent and sloppy and lazy, but something about him inspires friendship so strong that Arthur could no more leave Merlin to die of a poisoned chalice than he could step away from his own mother.

He’s hardly surprised that his father locks him away in the dungeon when he returns with the morteaus flower, but Arthur is no longer afraid of the dark, not when Gwen’s hands reach out to him, not when Morgana comes to sit with him, not when he knows that his actions have saved the life of someone who willingly gave it for him. Merlin makes him feel like something other than the heir apparent, and he would never trade that for anything in the world. Not even, so it seems, for his father’s trust in him. Or perhaps, he thinks, in spite of it.

 

.

[When Arthur is 22--](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0UyMxDWIw)


End file.
